But note how all the machinery of Press control and war-time colleges of propaganda prepared the public mind for the extremely difficult task of the settlement and Treaty-making that lay before it. (It was a task in which everything indicated that, unless great care were taken, public judgment would be so swamped in passion that a workable peace would be impossible.) The more tribal and barbaric aspect of the conception of collective responsibility was fortified by the intensive and deliberate exploitation of atrocities during the years of the War. The atrocities were not just an incident of war-time news: the principal emotions of the struggle came to centre around them. Millions whom the obscure political debate behind the conflict left entirely cold, were profoundly moved by these stories of cruelty and barbarity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was among those who urged their systematic exploitation on that ground, in a Christmas communication to the _Times_.[88] With reference to stories of German cruelty, he said:-- 'Hate has its uses in war, as the Germans have long discovered. It steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do. So much do they feel this that Germans are constrained to invent all sorts of reasons for hatred against us, who have, in truth, never injured them in any way save that history and geography both place us before them and their ambitions. To nourish hatred they invent every lie against us, and so they attain a certain national solidity.... 'The bestiality of the German nation has given us a driving power which we are not using, and which would be very valuable in this stage of the war. Scatter the facts. Put them in red-hot fashion. Do not preach to the solid south, who need no conversion, but spread the propaganda wherever there are signs of any intrigue--on the Tyne, the Clyde, in the Midlands, above all in Ireland, and French Canada. Let us pay no attention to platitudinous Bishops or gloomy Deans or any other superior people, who preach against retaliation or whole-hearted warfare. We have to win, and we can only win by keeping up the spirit of resolution of our own people.' Particularly does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle urge that the munition workers--who were, it will be remembered, largely woman--be stimulated by accounts of atrocities: 'The munition workers have many small vexations to endure, and their nerves get sadly frayed. They need strong elemental emotions to carry them on. Let pictures be made of this and other incidents. Let them be hung in every shop. Let them be distributed thickly in the Sinn Fein districts of Ireland, and in the hot-beds of Socialism and Pacifism in England and Scotland. The Irishman has always been of a most chivalrous nature.'